Brittany Snow is intimately familiar with the feeling of being underestimated. Since breaking out as a wide-eyed teenager on the CBS daytime soap Guiding Light and the NBC period family drama American Dreams over two decades ago, Snow has made a career out of playing women whose beauty belies the storm of emotions brewing beneath the surface.

“I think there’s a stigma around people who show up with vulnerability and empathy and wide-eyed enthusiasm and curiosity,” says Snow. “That’s sometimes labeled as not having a very high intellect. I like to be underestimated because I want to prove people wrong. I guess that’s why people see that in my characters. I bring that with me when I do anything.”

Trading in her girl-next-door persona, Snow delivered three vastly different performances over the past year, each featuring a whip-smart woman fighting for her own survival. Last summer, she reentered the cultural zeitgeist playing a liberal transplant who falls in with a group of East Texas housewives in Netflix’s sexed-up, soapy satire The Hunting Wives. She then starred in the streamer’s taut thriller The Beast in Me, playing an unassuming art gallerist who orchestrates the downfall of her homicidal husband. Finally, in Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, she plays the real-life reporter who helped crack open the case against affluent former South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh.

Snow is the audience’s eyes into the world of Hunting Wives, starring as a married mother named Sophie O’Neil who embarks on a passionate love affair with spellbinding socialite Margo Banks (Malin Akerman). Having spent most of her adult life trapped in a gilded cage, Sophie finds her desires awakened by Margo, a gubernatorial candidate’s wife whose licentious private life contradicts her conservative public persona.

“When she meets Margo, Sophie is tapping into a part of herself” — namely, her femininity and sexuality — “that she’s shut away from herself. So a lot of the time, she’s trying really hard to resist something that feels so a part of her DNA,” Snow explains of her emotionally “stunted” character, for whom Margo is rendered irresistible: “In the second season, you see that this is a girl that’s actually very familiar with being dangerous and playing with fire,” Snow teases.

True to form, the next season will dial up the amount of both political commentary and sexual content with some good old-fashioned camp. “There’s so much more sex, but [involving] so many more people and so many more storylines,” Snow says with a laugh.

Mirroring their onscreen counterparts, Snow takes a highly analytical approach to her craft, while Akerman relies more on instinct. The two leaned on each other — and their predominantly female cast and crew — while shooting the raciest intimate scenes. “Kissing women is my preferred pastime now,” Akerman quips while praising Snow. “She is always considerate, and we are very open about how we’re feeling between each take so that we can adjust if anything is feeling uncomfortable.”

With Sophie, Snow has particularly relished getting to shed her “good girl” persona to play an increasingly “unhinged” woman teetering on the edge of total personal ruin. “Sophie is one of those people that goes for it when she wants something — and she really wants this new life. There’s a lot of overlap with her and Margo in season two where you question who is the most manipulative, and Sophie does it in a very different way than Margo does,” Snow offers. Even after Sophie seemingly killed Margo’s estranged brother out of desperation in the season one finale, “there becomes this toxic partnership in which they realize that they need each other more than they expected,” she adds.

“Toxic” also perfectly describes the relationship between Snow’s character, Nina, and her real-estate mogul husband, Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), in The Beast in Me. Nina is introduced as the seemingly vacuous trophy wife of Nile, a man who secretly murdered his first wife — and Nina’s former boss — Madison (Leila George) in a fit of passion.

While Nina may play house with Nile and dress in quiet luxury, Snow wanted to reveal little chinks in her armor to show that she didn’t come from wealth. Over eight episodes, viewers learn that “she’s a survivor, and she’s working on a primal instinct to stay alive and to get what she wants,” Snow says. Rather than a marriage built on true love, Nina and Nile’s relationship is like that of sparring partners. “When they are fighting, she wants him to see her as an equal and knows that he responds well to someone standing up to him,” Snow adds. “She takes that into the bedroom as well, because she’s trying to assert some sort of power that she knows is a struggle to maintain.”

Claire Danes, who served as an executive producer and plays the author who takes a perverse interest in Nile, confirms to THR that the creative team was always planning for Nina to be involved in taking down her husband, but notes, “Once we saw how great Brittany was, [Nina] became even more developed as a character than she was going to be.”

In the end, “Nina did get exactly what she wanted, in terms of the family that she had always wanted to create and getting out of that tiny apartment with the string lights,” Snow says of her character, who is last seen holding her and Nile’s baby. “She’s one of those people that doesn’t necessarily know how to love someone without an agenda. So when Nile dies [in prison], she may be on to the next person and falls in love with the next thing that can help her. I don’t judge my characters, but she’s messed up enough to believe that that’s the next choice for her.”

The least morally ambiguous of Snow’s latest characters is Mandy Matney, the investigative journalist whose podcast served as the source material for Murdaugh. From the outset, Snow told the real-life Matney that she was “not interested in doing an imitation” of her. Instead, the actress studied her counterpart’s voice and mannerisms, “and then tried to come up with something that was most like her essence.”

While Murdaugh is ultimately not about Matney, “I wanted to make sure that she really was the light in a really dark story. These dark things can happen that we can’t control, but there are people that search for the truth in such a pure way,” says Snow. “Mandy is the epitome of wanting the truth to come out, for women to have justice.”

Like her characters, Snow has always been more than meets the eye. But after taking a self-imposed hiatus to address her own mental health in her 20s, the actress admits that, at 40, she no longer believes that being hard on herself is the key to moving forward, noting that she has finally learned to let go of that negativity and just enjoy her work. This kind of candor has not gone unnoticed by collaborators like Dane, who notes that there is often a kinship among actors who started out in the business at an early age.

“She’s very open and has shared very bravely about the ways in which she’s struggled in life, but she’s thoughtful and self-reflective in a beautiful way — not in a self-involved, narcissistic way at all,” Danes says of Snow. “She’s creatively and emotionally ambitious in a way that I really respect and admire. She’s as far from complacent as you could possibly be.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.